Stepping backward, she flashed on their mother swaddled up on the third floor after a fight at home with their father. Dara, age fifteen, rushing to the studio with good news （Mother, I’m going to be one of the Dewdrops in The Nutcracker）， hearing their mother’s voice upstairs and taking one tentative step after another, the staircase shivering as she did. So unsafe, their mother used to say. Not for you.
And another voice, a voice saying her mother’s name.
And she held tight and tighter, her hand gripping the steel so tight it might cut her.
Mother . . .
* * *
*
Dara.”
Dara turned to the door with a start, jerking her hand from the railing.
It was Marie, waiting like a cat.
It was then that she realized she still had Marie’s scarf in her hand, curled up into a ball. Discreetly, she dropped it into her sweater pocket, damp and crushed.
“What are you doing?” Marie asked, biting her thumbnail, a nervous habit since childhood, but one Dara hadn’t seen in a long time.
“Nothing,” Dara said, walking back down the steps. “Cleaning the mud tracks maybe.”
“That’s mine, up there,” Marie said, gesturing to the third floor. “That’s my space.”
“Is it now,” Dara said, pushing past her. Not liking her tone. “Funny. Because we own the building. Charlie and me. Just like we own the house.”
Marie stepped back slightly, teetering on one heel.
“So,” Dara continued, “guess who’s trespassing?”
Marie stood, her thumb between her teeth, like a child who knows there’s nothing she can say.
* * *
*
Dara hadn’t intended to say it. She tried never to mention that kind of thing, the business arrangements. Just like when Marie sold her share of the house to them five years ago to go to Europe. When she returned, Dara was careful never to remind Marie that she was technically now their guest.
Marie didn’t really have a home, Dara thought suddenly. A wave of something—sadness—coming over her before she fought it off. Pushed it away.
* * *
*
That night, she told Charlie as they sat at the kitchen table drinking refrigerator wine.
“Well,” Charlie said, “she can do what she wants up there, can’t she?”
“It’s not appropriate. It’s our place of business.”
“I don’t know, Dara. But you really shouldn’t be up there. I mean, that’s her home.”
“That’s not her home,” Dara said. “This is her home.”
“She left,” Charlie said with a new coolness, his mouth slightly slack, his muscle relaxants taking hold. “Remember.”
* * *
*
Dara was getting ready for bed that night when Marie’s scarf fell from her pocket and landed on the carpet like a sad rag, its red polka dots like a clown.
Swiftly, she picked it up and threw it in the trash. Then reached down and buried the scarf beneath the trash, the old Band-Aids, the bent bobby pins.
HOT BLONDE
Early the next morning, at the studio, Dara was able to forget everything.
It was a lovely moment of stillness, of dancer and dancer, the mirrors, the movement, a body arching, turning, flying.
All she heard was the soft thrush of Corbin Lesterio’s feet on the floor. The occasional crunch of his knee, the pop of an arching foot. Corbin’s breath, nervous and then calmer. His form strong and then stronger. His bearing becoming, slowly, the bearing of a prince.
He’d persuaded his father to pay for private lessons to help him with his Nutcracker audition, and then with the part itself. And Corbin was so eager to please, showing her again and again his tour en l’air. Legs together, Dara called out again and again, studying him.
After, she found herself talking to Corbin in the changing room, chatting about the role of the Nutcracker Prince, helping him with his coat, his hands fumbling with the buttons. Teasing him a little bit about his Adam’s apple, and how it might ruin his form.
He was so nervous the whole time, his voice speeding up, cracking. He was so nervous and forever blushing, which was so charming.
* * *
*
For the first time in days and days, she felt like herself, her studio free of intrusions, the speakers soundless, the drills unplugged, her focus fixed and intent. She wanted to hold on to it.
Before the arrivals began, the needy, anxious students, whispered chattering and endless preening. Before the parents—Mrs. Briscombe, whose seven-year-old had taken up the habit of eating the drywall, paper, and dirt in Studio B, the endless queries from Dr. Weston, whose daughter Pepper had been caught breaking the shanks of Bailey Bloom’s pointe shoes, which was better than the razor blade but hardly ideal.